41 Four approaches to anticipatory governance 2 consequences of social and technical innovation as well as possible opportunities for changing the system (Chaffin et al., 2016; Hebinck et al., 2018). A third, critical domain of thinking on anticipation focuses on interrogating the normative claims underlying anticipatory processes and the potential disconnect between anticipating futures versus making present-day choices in governance. For example, Bell emphasizes that “futurists have done a great deal of practical methodological work on the prediction problem, but they have done less to justify their judgments of preferable futures” (Bell, 2001, p. 72). Recent writings have emphasized how reflexivity about the politics of future-oriented anticipation processes is missing in most futures studies, particularly regarding how the future is framed and what power such frames have over present governance (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). Such critical thinking on anticipation is also a mainstay of research in science and technology studies, sociology of the future, and responsible research and innovation (Bellamy, 2016; Jasanoff & Kim, 2015; Jasanoff & Markle, 2008; Nordmann, 2014; Selin, 2008). A key focus in such writings is on how practices of anticipation — and the ideas of the future expressed therein — are sites of political conflict and negotiation. For example, Selin (2008, p. 1892) suggests that “as social scientists begin to weave their own accounts of futures, they should pay attention to the politics of such rendering”. Writings in this vein also engage with the notion of “sociotechnical imaginaries” by Jasanoff and Kim (2009, 2015), who define such imaginaries as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order, and attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015, p. 4). This line of research then interrogates how such sociotechnical imaginaries frame the possibilities for action in the present and have performative effects by casting some futures as more desirable, attainable, or even imaginable than others. For example, Esguerra (2019) investigates the socio-material politics of different ‘future objects’. Anderson (2010) offers an analysis from the perspective of geography about how the future is problematized as indeterminate or uncertain, and investigates different ways of engaging with such ‘problematic’ futures, including through reliance on, inter alia, pre-emption, precaution, and preparedness. 2.4. Four approaches to anticipatory governance: diverse conceptions of the future, actions in the present and ultimate aims With this broad overview of both explicit and implicit understandings of anticipatory governance in the literature, we now turn to distilling similarities and differences across them, in terms of: the conceptions of the future, implications for present actions, and
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